NYT’s Apple Debate Factcheck, Without Facts

If Arthur Brisbane wants the Times to consider becoming factchecking ‘truth vigilantes,” this is hopefully not what he had in mind.

At last night’s Republican debate (1/19/12), CNN host John King asked the candidates how they would convince a corporation like Apple to employ more workers in the United States:

It employs about 500,000 people in China. It is based in the United States, has some employees here, about 40-something thousand, I think 46,000. Most of them in retail stores and at the headquarters. 500,000 of them are in China. As a president of the United States, what do you do about that?

The candidates gave the answers you might expect–Santorum advocated for cutting the corporate tax rate to zero, Ron Paul thought the this situation might be partly due to “the union problem.”

It’s the kind of exchange that’s rather difficult to factcheck; it’s a political argument more than anything else. But the Times thought a factcheck could be found in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, where the late Apple CEO explained his decision to manufacture in China:

At a dinner party in Silicon Valley, Mr. Jobs told the president that the company needed 30,000 engineers to support those factory workers.

“You can’t find that many in America to hire,” Mr. Jobs said.

Mr. Isaacson wrote: “These factory engineers did not have to be PhDs or geniuses; they simply needed to have basic engineering skills for manufacturing. Tech schools, community colleges or trade schools could train them.”

“If you could educate these engineers,” Mr. Jobs said, “we could move more manufacturing plants here.”

Not taxes. Not regulation. Education.

Of course the justification that a CEO uses to take advantage of much cheaper labor available in China is going to sound something like this. It’s highly unlikely that Apple could not possibly find thousands of community college-trained workers in the United States.

If you really want to know why Steve Jobs liked manufacturing in China, the Huffington Postsingled out a different answer from Isaacson’s book

Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where “regulations and unnecessary costs” make it difficult for them.

If you want to know why Apple does what it does, Steve Jobs might not be the best source. You could ask one of the company’s critics, like Mike Daisey. A recent Times review of Daisey’s recent Steve Jobs monologue revealed this about Daisey’s research into Apple’s Chinese manufacturers:

While the official Chinese workday is eight hours, the norm at Foxconn is more like 12 and even longer when the introduction of a product is at hand. One worker died after a 34-hour shift. Some of the workers he meets are as young as 13, and because of the repetitive nature of the labor, their hands often become deformed and useless within a decade, rendering them unemployable.

It doesn’t sound like the substandard American educational system explains Apple’s corporate philosophy. But it’s apparently what the Times believes, because Steve Jobs once said so.

UPDATE: On March 16, 2012, the public radio show Marketplaceexposed major elements of Mike Daisey’s account of his investigation of the Foxconn manufacturing plant to be fabricated and/or conflated, and This American Liferetracted its report that featured Daisey as its main source. The descriptions of meeting with underaged workers and a worker with a disabled hand appear to be among the parts of his story that Daisey made up.

Activism Director and and Co-producer of CounterSpinPeter Hart is the activism director at FAIR. He writes for FAIR's magazine Extra! and is also a co-host and producer of FAIR's syndicated radio show CounterSpin. He is the author of The Oh Really? Factor: Unspinning Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly (Seven Stories Press, 2003). Hart has been interviewed by a number of media outlets, including NBC Nightly News, Fox News Channel's O'Reilly Factor, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday and the Associated Press. He has also appeared on Showtime and in the movie Outfoxed. Follow Peter on Twitter at @peterfhart.

This again shows a media that won’t talk about National Hiring Day.Both parties stress patriotism and jobs. How is it that they then oppose a National Hiring Day? We want jobs, we love America, but we can’t hire even one person FOR America?
Political bickering only insures no one gets work. We have to all work together and we can’t palm this off on congress anymore. We have to put the needs of the people out of work over political gotchas.ÃƒÆ’Â¢ÃƒÂ¢”Å¡Â¬Ãƒâ€šÂ

National Hiring Day – This is a day that corporations are encouraged to hire new employees. Corporations are called on to put patriotism first and help their country in
hard times. Those corporations that cannot hire, are asked to stop firing for that month.

Having worked in Silicon Valley almost my whole life, there is or was a lot of vitality here, but as time has gone by it has become a status driven society taken over by arrogant managers who fight and bicker with each other for their empires and control of head count and budget.

This hierarchical status driven fake political image ethos, without any hint of merit, is what is killing the US, everything is a lie and the people who have talent are just resources for these SOBs who who only care about themselves.

We can do great things in America, but ultimately everything that gets to a certain size starts to become a corrupt political entity antithetical to the rest of the country. Particularly with the recession workers are at each other’s throats. If there is no answerability for something like the mess we are in today, with all of it unraveling in public and with the citizens having votes, what is happening in corporations where whatever they do they get bonuses and bailouts and everything happens in the dark?

It only keeps going because they can generate enough money for these people to stay aligned to this system to keep from tearing at each other ÃƒÆ’Â¢ÃƒÂ¢”Å¡Â¬Ãƒâ€šÂ¦ so they tear at everyone else in the country.

No one knows the answers to all of this stuff or we would have heard stories and ideas that we all agree on, so my ideas have always centered around – design an infrastructure that provides for the American people first, and then leave plenty of room for these people to either succeed or fail, but NOT to take down everyone else in the process.

Basic needs, food, housing, infrastructure, education, health care, for all Americans in an open system that can be criticized and improved and made cheaper over time. Give people work that they have a say in and we will be far ahead of the other countries of the world in 20 years ÃƒÆ’Â¢ÃƒÂ¢”Å¡Â¬Ãƒâ€šÂ¦ except in the arrogance of our elites .. who need a good ass-kicking anyway! ;-)

Some interesting stuff BRAUX…….
We need to create a place where business finds this” thee” most hospitable place for them to conduct business.Ask anyone if they would rather live here or there.They will choose the best place to live.In life that bottom line can be many things.In business it is almost always profit.I would say you always have an edge with people preferring to keep their industry here.But you can only push that so far.Creating a country with high taxes and regulation, with near the top of the corporate tax scale will always have but one result.As sure as the sun will rise, those businesses will fly….to greener pasture’s.Every time you put a punitive tax, or regulation on industry here ,the Chinese clear more land for a new complex there.Continuing in this way will precipitate our decline with mathematical certainty.

Ron I think you just said all economic activity should be regulated to protect essential environmental concerns.Wow that is putting all the eggs in one basket under one Federal overlord.And that seems to be your thought process.An ever empowered Fed built to control all those fools who thought this was a country built on personal freedoms.For our own good of course.Ron I’ll pass on that sort of country.

Aside from the black market, all economic activity is already regulated, Michael.

The only problem is that taxes, tax breaks, licences and rules of operation are all regulated to favour the bigger and the biggest. Allowing giant corporations to pollute our air, foul our water, denature our food and ignore our plight while filling executive and shareholder coffers (the 1%), seems folly to me.

The freedom to make money should never come at the expense of society.

I have no problem with people getting rich. But we shouldn’t make it easier for them to get richer – especially when the needs of the 99% are obvious.

What do you think of my proposal for a rising incremental tax structure, going from, say 40% on the first million to 90% on the 999th million?

Well Ron Im for a simplified tax structure for sure.Not the 525 pages in Mitts return.We cant have a graduated thing like you envision.A Bill Gates would just quit and go home after his first million.Or second ,or third,or first billion.What you are really envisioning is when should we stop a rich man from getting richer ,and force him into retirement if he has half a brain.Didn’t reagan want 15%-25%-35% with few if any loopholes?Of course a second tax on investments /capital gains is another nut.Again the question in line with that, is do we want to stop personal investment/reinvestment?Do we believe that is governments job,though we Know they do nothing of the sort well?
As far as all economic activity being regulated,I think you mean “laws” are in place to govern commerce.Regulations tend to be more transient, and politically motivated.We need less of that.Obama said the other day we need to appoint more regulatory committees.Translations….. more power structures under political control not legal.
Remember a poll last month said only 2% Are angry at the so called 1%.It is a concoction of Obamas class warfare theme.When you say allowing-big companies to do this or that you set a false premise.First it is taken for granted that this is what all large companies do.Second…Laws are already in place for such things.Laws business must follow.You think giving the government(which does nothing well)more regulations will help?
Companies receive breaks because it benefits government and society.The house set those rules.They make a hell of a lot of money doing so.The lefts template is simple really.Do everything right according to the rules and if we see you are doing too well-we will change the rules to take more.And please tell me how getting rich rich richer in any way is at the EXPENSE of society?Lets remember how much of the total the rich pay now of the tax base.87% and up.Bottom 50% pay NOTHING in fed income taxes.Believe me Ron nobody is getting away with anything with numbers like that.

Well, Michael, I don’t want to stop a rich person from getting richer. I just don’t think the government should make it easier. Right now, the playing field is tilted to favour the 1%, and against the 99%. It’s easier for someone with 50 million to make another million than it is for someone with one million, and a whole lot easier than someone making 50K.

I agree with you about the loopholes. Let’s toss most of them out. They only help the wealthy anyways. Think again about taxing income progressively, incrementally. How about 35% on the first million and 35.1% on the next million, 35.2% on the third…all the way to 90% on the 999th million?

Laws and regulations (lets not split hairs here) are all politically motivated. In theory, they should protect the interests of all parties affected by the economic activity. Dumping sludge in the river might improve the businessman’s bottom line, but it doesn’t improve the lives of people downriver. The corporate line is that the market (ie. economic success) is an effective substitute for regulations, but that is extreme naivety. We’ve just been given a stunning example of this with the deregulation of the financial sector leading to recession/depression. You can’t blame unions or ACORN for that, but that sure hasn’t stopped the pr industry from trying.

While some companies might get some breaks because their actions benefit society, most of the breaks come because they lavishly fund candidates from both parties, and employ an army of lobbyists.

Finally, do you really think the bottom 50% of society are getting a free ride because they don’t make enough to pay income tax? There are a lot of obvious rebuttals to this, Michael, but let me try a different tack. Do you really think that hedge fund manager who made 5 billion last year, worked 100,000 times as hard as the truckdriver/teacher/factory worker/nurse/fireman/etc, who only made 50K?

Ron first I never thought regulation or deregulation caused the meltdown.Fanny and Freddy began this mess and their were political leaders who lied about the state of things.Clinton began the drive to force banks to look outside good business practices allowing them to play to pay without a chance of loosing.They were government guaranteed baby.Bush was not able to stop it.Wall street wins coming or going.So that is always a given.And in a sense thank God.Bet 50% if ya win and 50% if you loose short selling for profit is smart.
Ron I think the man who made 5 billion probably took 5 billion more chances than the truck driver.He rolled the dice over and over.He did not play it safe.The difference I think between you and i is i believe a free market reinvests money in a natural symbiotic way.Government creates bread lines that benefits bigger government .Government does nothing well as far as economic go.
Also i don’t believe in the so called 1%.If they do exist I thank them for paying the great majority of taxes.Ron I am not espousing robber barons.We have a society where the rich pay 87%.Should they pay 99%?Well at some point it is a question of diminishing returns.Try it in microcosm.Every dem running for president will be under a new test tax.Since it has been proven that being elected is hitting the lottery(Clinton made 100 million in 7 years) and in a sense it being unearned income due to payment being based on election results not any particular real work…..,I propose they be taxed at 99% during their stay as president and for 20 years after.Sound stupid?It is.Good presidential candidates will dry up.
Every time you lower taxes the economy roars back.Ron I believe we need to recreate wealth.Put government in a very small box.We the people can take it from here.Nice talking to you too Ron

One other thought.Paul Ryan today said that if you look at the math……….That if a magic wand was waved and Dems got all the tax raises they wanted it would pay for but 8% of Obamas proposed spending increases.Does this not show the game that is being played.What a waste of time

You have it backwards, Michael. Clinton didn’t force banks to take risk. He didn’t offer to insure their losses. They persuaded him to allow it. But it doesn’t really matter who started the process called “deregulation”. It lead, as you said, to the financial crisis.

Five billion chances would be a new chance every second for a couple of lifetimes. Robber barons like to exaggerate their contributions, too. Most of them though, like that hedge fund manager, just happen to be standing near the main gush of new found riches. The only work they do is figuring out how to divert a lot of money into their own back yards.

You’re right about the parties, too. The difference between them is tiny – Dems want to take a little bit more from the rich and give it to the poor.

I’m curious about your background, Michael, and how it has shaped your conservative thinking.

I’m almost seventy, white, middle class, and have worked in a variety of fields – white/blue collar, academic, entrepreneurial. I spent a decade in Africa and Asia. My anti-capitalist outlook developed in university. It’s held up for more than fifty years, although the world has certainly undergone a lot of changes.